“I don’t think you altogether as foolish as I used to, Hewet,” said Hirst. “You don’t know what you mean but you try to say it.”
“But aren’t you enjoying yourself here?” asked Hewet.
“On the whole—yes,” said Hirst. “I like observing people. I like looking at things. This country is amazingly beautiful. Did you notice how the top of the mountain turned yellow tonight? Really we must take our lunch and spend the day out. You’re getting disgustingly fat.” He pointed at the calf of Hewet’s bare leg.
“We’ll get up an expedition,” said Hewet energetically. “We’ll ask the entire hotel. We’ll hire donkeys and—”
“Oh, Lord!” said Hirst, “do shut it! I can see Miss Warrington and Miss Allan and Mrs. Elliot and the rest squatting on the stones and quacking, ‘How jolly!’”
“We’ll ask Venning and Perrott and Miss Murgatroyd—every one we can lay hands on,” went on Hewet. “What’s the name of the little old grasshopper with the eyeglasses? Pepper?—Pepper shall lead us.”
“Thank God, you’ll never get the donkeys,” said Hirst.
“I must make a note of that,” said Hewet, slowly dropping his feet to the floor. “Hirst escorts Miss Warrington; Pepper advances alone on a white ass; provisions equally distributed—or shall we hire a mule? The matrons—there’s Mrs. Paley, by Jove!—share a carriage.”
“That’s where you’ll go wrong,” said Hirst. “Putting virgins among matrons.”
“How long should you think that an expedition like that would take, Hirst?” asked Hewet.
“From twelve to sixteen hours I would say,” said Hirst. “The time usually occupied by a first confinement.”
“It will need considerable organisation,” said Hewet. He was now padding softly round the room, and stopped to stir the books on the table. They lay heaped one upon another.
“We shall want some poets too,” he remarked. “Not Gibbon; no; d’you happen to have Modern Love or John Donne? You see, I contemplate pauses when people get tired of looking at the view, and then it would be nice to read something rather difficult aloud.”
“Mrs. Paley will enjoy herself,” said Hirst.
“Mrs. Paley will enjoy it certainly,” said Hewet. “It’s one of the saddest things I know—the way elderly ladies cease to read poetry. And yet how appropriate this is:
I speak as one who plumbs
Life’s dim profound,
One who at length can sound
Clear views and certain.
But—after love what comes?
A scene that lours,
A few sad vacant hours,
And then, the Curtain.
I daresay Mrs. Paley is the only one of us who can really understand that.”
“We’ll ask her,” said Hirst. “Please, Hewet, if you must go to bed, draw my curtain. Few things distress me more than the moonlight.”
Hewet retreated, pressing the poems of Thomas Hardy beneath his arm, and in their beds next door to each other both the young men were soon asleep.
Between the extinction of Hewet’s candle and the rising of a dusky Spanish boy who was the first to survey the desolation of the hotel in the early morning, a few hours of silence intervened. One could almost hear a hundred people breathing deeply, and however wakeful and restless it would have been hard to escape sleep in the middle of so much sleep. Looking out of the windows, there was only darkness to be seen. All over the shadowed half of the world people lay prone, and a few flickering lights in empty streets marked the places where their cities were built. Red and yellow omnibuses were crowding each other in Piccadilly; sumptuous women were rocking at a standstill; but here in the darkness an owl flitted from tree to tree, and when the breeze lifted the branches the moon flashed as if it were a torch. Until all people should awake again the houseless animals were abroad, the tigers and the stags, and the elephants coming down in the darkness to drink at pools. The wind at night blowing over the hills and woods was purer and fresher than the wind by day, and the earth, robbed of detail, more mysterious than the earth coloured and divided by roads and fields. For six hours this profound beauty existed, and then as the east grew whiter and whiter the ground swam to the surface, the roads were revealed, the smoke rose and the people stirred, and the sun shone upon the windows of the hotel at Santa Marina until they were uncurtained, and the gong blaring all through the house gave notice of breakfast.
Directly breakfast was over, the ladies as usual circled vaguely, picking up papers and putting them down again, about the hall.
“And what are you going to do today?” asked Mrs. Elliot drifting up against Miss Warrington.
Mrs. Elliot, the wife of Hughling the Oxford Don, was a short woman, whose expression was habitually plaintive. Her eyes moved from thing to thing as though they never found anything sufficiently pleasant to rest upon for any length of time.
“I’m going to try to get Aunt Emma out into the town,” said Susan. “She’s not seen a thing yet.”
“I call it so spirited of her at her age,” said Mrs. Elliot, “coming all this way from her own fireside.”
“Yes, we always tell her she’ll die on board ship,” Susan replied. “She was born on one,” she added.
“In the old days,” said Mrs. Elliot, “a great many people were. I always pity the poor women so! We’ve got a lot to complain of!” She shook her head. Her eyes wandered about the table, and she remarked irrelevantly, “The poor little Queen of Holland! Newspaper reporters practically, one may say, at her bedroom door!”
“Were you talking of the Queen of Holland?” said the pleasant voice of Miss Allan, who was searching for the thick pages of The Times among a litter of thin foreign sheets.
“I always envy any one who lives in such an excessively flat country,” she remarked.
“How very strange!” said Mrs. Elliot. “I find a flat country so depressing.”
“I’m afraid you can’t be very happy here then, Miss Allan,” said Susan.
“On the contrary,” said Miss Allan, “I am exceedingly fond of mountains.” Perceiving The Times at some distance, she moved off to secure it.
“Well, I must find my husband,” said Mrs. Elliot, fidgeting away.
“And I must go to my aunt,” said Miss Warrington, and taking up the duties of the day they moved away.
Whether the flimsiness of foreign sheets and the coarseness of their type is any proof of frivolity and ignorance, there is no doubt that English people scarce consider news read there as news, any more than a programme bought from a man in the street inspires confidence in what it says. A very respectable elderly pair, having inspected the long tables of newspapers, did not think it worth their while to read more than the headlines.
“The debate on the fifteenth should have reached us by now,” Mrs. Thornbury murmured. Mr. Thornbury, who was beautifully clean and had red rubbed into his handsome worn face like traces of paint on a weather-beaten wooden figure, looked over his glasses and saw that Miss Allan had The Times.
The couple therefore sat themselves down in arm-chairs and waited.
“Ah, there’s Mr. Hewet,” said Mrs. Thornbury. “Mr. Hewet,” she continued, “do come and sit by us. I was telling my husband how much you reminded me of a dear old friend of mine—Mary Umpleby. She was a most delightful woman, I assure you. She grew roses. We used to stay with her in the old days.”
“No young man likes to have